Oracle is making a big play to cash in on the simplification of enterprise IT environments with "engineered systems," the collection of vertically integrated appliances that debuted five years ago with Exadata.
While Oracle insists customers who enter into the Big Red cocoon will reap all kinds of benefits, some may be hesitant …

COMMENTS

My two cents

Larry should revive the Sun name. Oracle has a worldwide reputation for things that are VERY EXPENSIVE. Sun wasn't cheap, but Sun's name was more closely tied to innovative and powerful. I know that since the buyout, almost none of my customers (the biggest IT companies in Norway) have looked twice at what was once Sun.

Also, Sun did a much much better job on keeping OS documentation available to all users. People even bought Sun machines because the documentation wasn't buried like it is now.

Oh. Solaris? Who's going to use an operating system if they're not even sure what it's called anymore?

Re: My two cents

Re: My two cents

Larry actually appeared in Iron Man 2 (even though there was Dell PowerEdge servers in the Stark mansion). The Avengers featured several racks of Exadata kit in the opening scenes in the garish red racks. Yay product placement.

Re: My two cents

Re: My two cents

The Avengers featured several racks of Exadata kit in the opening scenes in the garish red racks. Yay product placement.

It's surprisingly effective. All of my customers who are costumed superheroes are looking at Oracle for their next big IT purchase.

"Look, we have all these statistics on our supervillain battles and world-saving activities, and we're trying to analyze them to identify cost-saving synergies and unrealized opportunities. We think Red Stack can help, though we're a bit worried about the name. Are you sure the Red Skull doesn't have anything to do with this?"

We did...

...Oracle Database Appliance is a good fit for us. I wish the storage on the original was more expandable though. 4TB with triple-mirroring on the v1.0 isn't really a ton of space. At least the new one is 6TB and has an expansion shelf option for 12TB with triple mirroring.

It also supports Oracle VM with hard partitioning for virtualizing apps alongside the DB so cores not licensed don't have to go unused. Use Data Guard between a pair of ODA's for DR and point RMAN to a Data Domain box with DD Boost plug-in and you have some happy DBAs. It actually does offer a fair bit of value for us.

Re: We did...

Exadata

Actually the Exadata is fairly decent bit of kit if you're stuck with Oracle database. What probably makes it harder to sell is that most enterprises already have heavy investment in high performance tier 1 SAN and thus it becomes a lot more difficult to justify the system which includes its own storage.

LDOMs with T5 are lot more attractive now that they have 2 PCI root complexes per socket meaning you don't have a single point of failure in the I/O domain.

Funny

how we never read about the massive IBM vendor lock in here, but we read about Oracle trying to offer much higher performance at a much lower cost. Up to 5-7x cost advantage. For instance, IBM Mainframe cpus are very slow and can not compete with x86 cpus. The POWER7 servers are slower and way more expensive than SPARC T5 servers, etc. So it seems that Oracle is trying to give customers a choice of value for the money. IBM can charge whatever they want because of lock in, but we never read about IBM doing that here. But Oracle offering cheap and better alternatives, is apparently bad, according to this web site. Timothy Prickett Morgan is probably the most IBM biased writer I've ever read, I was surprised that he was not the author this time. Apparently, several writers here are figthing Oracle and promoting IBM.

Re: Funny

I think I would prefer IBM

If I had a ton of money and a truly mission critical app, I think I would rather entrust it to IBM, who have been doing this stuff for 40 years, rather than Oracle, who have been doing it for about four. Just sayin'.